The big news coming from yesterday’s primary is that Mitt Romney has officially clenched the nomination. This is sort of a fake news story — it is what got the headlines out of the Texas slew of elections due to there not really being any real elections to talk about or discuss.

So, if we lead with that here’s what we look at.
Mitt Romney … 68.97 percent
Ron Paul … 11.94 percent

Ron Paul is a favorite son. Maybe? I don’t think this gets him to a delegate. The fun and frivolity continues at Daily Paul and various blog organs, though. See here, for instance. There will be a way that Ron Paul will get the Presidency, oh yes.

Coming in last place is… John Davis? With .32 percent of the vote. Who is John Davis? Immediately I think of the 1924 Democratic Presidential nominee. Who had a boomlet going for that as early as 1920, apparently. The low point in Democratic Presidential vote-getting, a man who dared say that the Klan was evil [to the chagrin of William Jennings Bryan] and ended his career as fighting on behalf of segregation in Brown v Board of Education.
This is a different John Davis. It may be that his campaign travel journal is worth a quick gander in the way any candidate fighting it out on a vanity campaign with a Constitution in one hand and a firearm in the other might be.

But the runoff, which will determine the GOP nominee to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, will mainly depend on which candidate can capture voters who turned out to support one of the other seven GOP candidates on Tuesday’s ballot.That competition centers on third place finisher Tom Leppert, the former mayor of Dallas, who received 13 percent of Tuesday’s vote. Anecdotal evidence suggests supporters of Leppert are more likely to back Dewhurst than Cruz in a runoff. But Cruz supporters believe they can mobilize and capitalize on tea party energy to achieve a win in July.

Maybe he can snake out support from all the other five candidates to match the support from Leppert?

The Senate race clusterfuck suggests that the Democrats don’t have a chance in Hell here. In a situation like this — a Republican state in a Presidential election year, they really would need to have a clear good front-liner “slated”:

Here’s to a run off between Pete Sadler and Grady Yarbrough. The word is that Yarbrough is that “fluke”-ish candidate nobody had ever really heard of that didn’t have any money. SeeUnlike his three competitors in the primary, Yarbrough has not reported raising or spending any money with the Federal Elections Commission. Yarbrough said he just hasn’t filed any reports yet but did spend money around the state promoting his campaign. Yarbrough said he advertised in African-American newspapers and had yard signs up in several parts of the state.

I can state categorically: he came in second because of the much heralded Senator in Texas history, Ralph Yarbrough.

That’s the state level for you. After that we get down to the Congressional seats. Where a lot of things are certainly there, under the radar, worth looking at.

Excellent news here: An Anti-Drug War progressive knocked off an eight-term incumbent: In El Paso, progressive Beto O’Rourke beateight-term Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes, and he did it without running away from the issue that brought him to prominence—the War on Drugs, which he considers to be an utter failure. Washington might not be able to talk about weed without making dumb pot jokes, but in far West Texas, they may have turned a corner.

Also excellent news here: Texas’ top birther is done: State Rep. Leo Berman (R) is famous in these parts for introducing a bill demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate and for attempting to ban Islamic Shariah law. (He also sponsored a secession rally.) But he’s a lame duck after losing to challenger Matt Schaefer. Per the Texas Tribune: ”Berman, who is battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma, had said that he was retiring after the last legislative session but decided to run again after meeting Schaefer, whom he described as arrogant.